HONG KONG—The U.K. and Russia each reported their first cases of the dangerous coronavirus, and other countries moved to limit air traffic with China as the number of people infected there approached 10,000.
Pakistan, a strategic ally of China, said Friday it would ban all commercial air travel to and from mainland China, a day after Italy suspended flights to China, including the territory of Hong Kong. Russia, too, said it would suspend flights to China from Russia, except for the regular flights by its flagship carrier, Aeroflot, to the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong.
Meanwhile, Singapore’s Health Ministry said it would expand its coronavirus-related entry restrictions to include anyone who had traveled to mainland China in the previous 14 days and deny visas to all Chinese passport holders, beginning late Saturday. Previously, Singapore had refused entry to those who had traveled to Hubei, the central Chinese province where the virus first originated, or had their passport issued there.
The moves came hours after the World Health Organization and the U.S. elevated their coronavirus alerts, as the death toll from the pneumonia-causing virus rose to 213 late Thursday, up from 170 a day earlier, and the number of illnesses surpassed 9,500.
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Russia’s first two coronavirus cases were both Chinese citizens, official Russian news agencies reported, citing the government.
The U.K.’s National Health Service said Friday that its first two confirmed cases were members of the same family in England.
Italy’s decision to halt air travel to China came after a Chinese couple in Rome were confirmed as having the virus. The country also declared a six-month medical state of emergency, which gives its central government extra powers to deal with suspected virus cases quickly and cut through Italian bureaucracy.
China made its first move to repatriate citizens abroad who wanted to return to the country. It arranged planes to bring home people from Hubei province, whose capital Wuhan is at the center of the outbreak. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Friday that its efforts were prompted by Hubei natives facing “actual difficulties” overseas. She didn’t elaborate.
Xiamen Air, which is majority-owned by China Southern Airlines Co., said it was flying one plane each on Friday to Bangkok and Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia—two popular tourist destinations—to take people to Wuhan. State broadcaster China Central Television reported that a flight operated by Spring Airlines was expected to bring 350 people from Tokyo back to Wuhan early Saturday.
Other governments, meantime, were scrambling to extricate their nationals from Wuhan, which has been on lockdown for more than a week as Chinese authorities try to contain the virus’s spread.
The French government has repatriated a few hundred of its citizens from Wuhan, authorities said. They arrived on Friday in the south of France, where they will stay for 14 days under medical supervision at a holiday center near Marseille. Six cases of the infection have been identified in the country.
A plane chartered by the U.K. with 110 Britons and citizens of other countries left Wuhan for Britain on Friday morning, the U.K. government said on its website. The flight was scheduled to go to Spain after stopping in the U.K.
The U.S. is planning to evacuate more Americans from Wuhan as early as Monday, after an initial flight primarily for staff of the U.S. consulate there departed on Wednesday. That flight carried 210 Americans, stopping in Anchorage before landing at a military base in Southern California.
As part of China’s efforts to contain the coronavirus from spreading, China’s national railway operator said ticket buyers would need to provide mobile phone numbers for every passenger, starting Saturday—a move that would allow authorities to contact anyone who had been on a train with a potential patient.
In Hong Kong, which has a handful of confirmed cases of the virus, school closures were extended until early March, city Chief Executive Carrie Lam said Friday.
On Thursday, the U.S. State Department raised its alert to the highest level, advising Americans in China to consider leaving the country and requesting all nonessential U.S. government personnel postpone travel there. The State Department applies the same “Do Not Travel” advice to Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela.
Before widening it Thursday, the State Department had applied the “Do Not Travel” advice only to Hubei province, while urging Americans to reconsider travel to China more generally.
The State Department advice came hours after the WHO designated the Wuhan coronavirus a global public-health emergency, indicating that public-health authorities now consider the respiratory virus a significant threat beyond China.
—Wenxin Fan, Xiao Xiao, Jason Douglas, Waqar Gillani, Ann Simmons, Marcus Walker, Noemie Bisserbe and Feliz Solomon contributed to this article.
Write to Erin Mendell at erin.mendell@wsj.com
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2020-01-31 14:51:00Z
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